This painting causes me physical pain from the sheer amount of pathos and emotion contained in its cuteness. It breaches through every cynical wall of adulthood and suddenly here I am, through the eyes of my mother, a lover, someone who knows me deeply. I see myself completely in it. Its not its official title but the phrase “mom am I pretty?” Associated with it on TikTok completes it I think. Its so raw in its cuteness and really interrogates the viewer on the topic of self perception and what it means to look at something with the eyes of love. Its one of those rare pieces of art that completely shatters me and I am 100% serious, I think it’s more powerful than a lottt of things I’ve studied and looked at through the years. Since I was a kid cuteness was one of the most powerful and overwhelming feelings to be felt in my body, it’s how I understood empathy, navigated through morality, protected myself, endangered myself, allowed proximity, played and narrated stories to myself. Just so we understand each other, specificity it’s important when it comes to cuteness. I’m taking about the kind of real unadulterated cuteness of an animal just born in the mud full of muck and blood, of a person quietly dancing in a club despite shame, the painful cuteness of frail things. cuteness as a delicate and soft shell to emotionally shield ourselves from the harshness of the world. Cuteness as wound and as band aid. Cute aggression. Cute as something we do, something inherently relational, that is built upon. Something that requires narration and storytelling. Cuteness as a codified language of care, something that is contained in most living beings in some way and that transcends taxonomies and species. A feeling so powerful that curiously breaches through survival instincts of some and makes it so living beings protect even those who are not of kin. A feeling that halts the seemingly omnipresent cycle of predation. A defence mechanism that breaks all of the agreeable evolutionary rules of adapting to be harsher. Cuteness instead protects the individual through nakedness, helplessness, complete and utter fragility. Its all around us and those of us who are attuned to it beg to be cared for through it. I am cute and my cuteness is the biggest gift of trust I can give to someone, it’s a defence mechanism, through it I enact scenarios of care and tenderness, it’s a short circuiting because its what allows me to overstay my welcome in complicated relationships, it is the soft animal in me, it is the soft pink tongue blooming through a yawn, inviting my neck to be placed between the sharp tooth, ready to be carried by my scruff. Its also why my relationship with masculinity and desire feels contradictory sometimes, we don’t live in a world where masculine people are cute (I certainly grew up with a very cute dad so it’s ingrained in me that the two things coexist). But yeah I feel this topic has so many ramifications I want to study and know more about it.
